Add to del.icio.us     Digg this

Jan. 27, 2010

Cisco, VMware and NetApp have expanded their long-term collaboration efforts by unveiling an end-to-end Secure Multi-tenancy Design Architecture that isolates IT resources for enhanced security in shared virtual and enterprise cloud environments.

Ralph Nimergood, v. p. Sales & Practice Management at Cisco says "with older, legacy data center architecture, the unit of organization was around the application itself. This had benefits, because you knew who was working on a specific application and it had robust policies around it, but it usually wasn't nimble enough."

"Then came server virtualization, and it virtualized a lot of the data center environment, consolidating server farms onto single servers," Nimergood continued. "But they haven't gone much farther than beyond zones of virtualization -- all Exchange servers being in one zone for instance. Across those zones they still aren't participating."

Cisco, VMware and NetApp will be providing a cooperative set of professional services which they say will deliver a better customer experience and help channel partners deploy a Secure Multi-tenancy Design Architecture with the least risk to their customers' current environment.

And they say the channel is key to the solution's success.

"We've built, tested and documented a new design for end-to-end secure multi-tenancy, which takes the things we liked about non-virtualized integrated stacks on policy and control, and brings them into to a virtualized world," Nimergood said.

"It maintains transactional level security. The different departments are kept separated, but pool IT infrastructure," added Nimergood.

The shared virtual infrastructure keeps resources for different tenants isolated, whether they be clients, business units, departments or security zones.

The solution requires purpose-built products from all three vendors. It is based on Cisco Nexus Series Switches and the Cisco Unified Computing System, NetApp FAS storage with MultiStore, and VMware vSphere and vShield Zones.

The design reference architecture has been jointly tested and validated as a Cisco Validated Design so customers can quickly assess their needs and deploy integrated solutions from Cisco, NetApp and VMware that meet the stringent requirements of their dynamic data centers.

As part of this collaboration, Cisco, VMware and NetApp are also introducing a global 24-hour cooperative support model. This model offers customers a more streamlined response from all three companies to better identify and solve potential issues related to the solutions used in the Secure Multi-tenancy Design Architecture.

"Moving to full 3-way joint support where any of these providers can handle a support call means a lot," said Ben Matheson, Senior Director Global Partner Marketing at VMware.

"There's a lot of value in this as far as simplicity," added Matheson.

Add to del.icio.us     Digg this

Source: Cisco.

All logos, trade marks or service marks on this website are the property of their respective companies or owners.

ADVERTISERS:
Linux News Today.org is read by over 450,000 people involved in the field of Linux application development, professional Web hosting services, Linux security, Linux Web development, etc. Inquire about our reasonable advertising rates on our news website. One of our advertising representatives will be in touch with you. Simply email us to learn about our ad rates and how we can help drive relevant traffic to your website. Advertising space is limited.